Against Fixed Stars
by polar-realm
Summary: A series of T'Pring/Gaila drabbles, slightly AUish, based on the Major Arcana of the tarot. Despite the fact that they've never met, and both of them may or may not actually be alive, these two make a certain amount of sense together.


A/N: These have been gathering dust on my hard drive for a while. I originally intended to write a series of T'Pring/Gaila drabbles based on the Major Arcana of the tarot for a challenge on lj's femslash_100 com. I never completed the challenge, because many of the drabbles turned out kind of awful, but these are the ones that I feel relatively OK about.

**Content note:** Numbers 7 and 16 both deal non-explicitly with sexual assault, 16 more so than 7, and a few others touch lightly on consent issues.

* * *

><p>0 - The Fool – Freefall<p>

Their hands touch, tentatively. And then there is nothing but the bright peal of Gaila's laughter testing the boundaries of her logic, making her imagine that she could walk off a cliff and _fly_.

Happiness, she thinks, but the word is limited. Freedom, perhaps. Reprieve. And then she discards words altogether, lets analysis slip through her fingers and fall away like the light fabric of her robe, bindings all unfastened and the air cool on her skin. Gaila falls backwards, pulling T'Pring with her, smiling up at her all wicked and radiant.

It only feels like falling for a moment.

* * *

><p>1 - The Magician<p>

They share quarters on the shuttle out of New Vulcan – two almost-strangers who know more about each other than they ought, and guess more even than that. They speak carefully, in codes and absences, when they speak at all. Gaila lounges on her bunk, examining the dismantled components of a phaser, sorted out by some logic evident only to her. Always making something, that one, taking something apart or putting it back together. Changing things.

"There are doors and doors," she says, eyes trickster-sharp. "Some of them look like walls. But they aren't."

T'Pring believes her.

Gaila's been here before, after all. Crossed that desert herself, when she was younger. She knows the way.

Later, she steps close and draws T'Pring down beside her. They let the codes go then, speak in touch and thought, chemical signal and electrical impulse, until there is nothing left but exhaustion. They stay that way all night, wrapped around each other, cradled in the darkness of a common space. And then morning comes and Gaila is leaving for destinations unknown, and T'Pring is going with her.

The shuttle door swings open. Gaila takes her hand, and leads her into the light.

* * *

><p>2 - The High Priestess<p>

Gaila sees T'Pring again one night on the streets of the new Vulcan capital, a city alien to both of them. There is a fountain in the center of a square, at a place where two roads meet, and the Vulcan woman is sitting on the edge of it, trailing her fingers in the water. Her eyes are soft with moonlight and what seems, from far away, almost like peace.

It is hard to tell, of course. Vulcans have made an art of equanimity, and this one, in particular, has made an art of revealing nothing. But when Gaila sees her there with all the armor fallen away, she is caught unexpectedly by that cool sweet stillness, like water from a dark well, and she knows there is more to this stranger than steel.

Gaila goes to sit beside her, uninvited but not, she thinks, unwelcome. They do not speak. There is no need to. But T'Pring's fingers brush hers – accidentally, she thinks – and she feels a lonely sort of yearning carried from skin to skin, electric, the dry heat of summer storms. She smiles, then, gently but not without a hint of challenge.

It is a beginning.

* * *

><p>3 - The Empress<p>

T'Pring needs this. Needs the touch of a stranger's hands, the shadowed curve of her hips and breasts, the elegant arc of her spine. She needs the heat and the light, the danger flickering like candlelight and the way that there is more to this than danger, the way that this woman pulls her through the twists and hollows of her own mind and out into the clarity beyond. No obligations, no endearments or lies – just life, in all its ruthless beauty.

Gaila's hair is the color of flame, her skin the color of blood, and in her eyes, her hands, her mind, there is the potentiality of lightning and the promise of rain on parched earth. And T'Pring knows not to put too much of herself into this moment. These things do not last. But for now, it is sufficient. For now, it is more than sufficient. And when morning casts its shadows black across the dry land, she will have this memory to sustain her.

But this is not morning, this is not the future stretching like open desert before her. There are no dead worlds here. Only darkness, and an illusion that could almost be truth.

* * *

><p>4 - The Emperor<p>

Since the day she was old enough to mark the patterns in her world, T'Pring strove to manipulate them. The alternative to control, she learned, was submission. The alternative to mastery of herself and her surroundings was irrationality, the vulnerability of one who cannot separate self from body. She has observed no middle ground. Given a choice – and she knows how rare it is to be given anything without cost, and that choice is a luxury greater than silks and spices, and more difficult to steal – she resolved that she would choose power, and let those who lacked the drive to seek it for themselves stand or fall as they would. The welfare of others is not her concern.

That was then.

Now, Gaila rests her head on T'Pring's chest, curled up easy and comfortable, and T'Pring allows this, though such closeness is still unfamiliar to her, too much akin to surrender. She perceives an emotion she has no name for, somewhere between desire and concern, and yes, she realizes, she knows this.

It is strange to be trusted, stranger still to trust.

She closes her eyes and breathes out, and permits herself to let go of control.

* * *

><p>6 - The Lovers<p>

The woman has been watching her from across the room for the past half an hour. It's a look that Gaila knows well, but this time there's an edge to it, something sharp and serpentine, maybe dangerous. But she knows danger too, grew up breathing it in with recycled station air, and it holds no terrors that she hasn't faced and seen through already.

So she beckons, a nod of her head and a raised hand, and the woman crosses the floor with measured steps, skirts swirling around strong legs, all movements marked by grace and restraint. She is Vulcan, Gaila sees, her skin a light olive-hued tan, her hair sleek and dark like oil and bound up in a braided crown. Vulcan arrogance too, out of place beneath dim bar lights, amid the wild, reeling music.

And _why_ is a question that sits mute and heavy on Gaila's tongue, but she will not ask it, because Gaila does not take what is not offered, and she knows already that this is not a woman to offer much.

"May I have your name?" the stranger asks.

"Depends," Gaila says, "on what you intend to do with it."

* * *

><p>7 - The Chariot<p>

She releases Gaila's hand and steps forward, sand and stone rough beneath her feet, apprehension tight in her chest. Desire too, a rising storm of it, not hers but filling her consciousness, stripping her of control.

_Courage_, she thinks. She imagines the weight and heft of the_ lirpa _in her hands, the patterns of attack and defense, runs through old lessons: momentum is a weapon. Use the enemy's force against him. Be merciless, and do not falter.

She has no expectation of victory. That will not stop her from fighting.

But before she can speak, another does. Gaila's voice, cutting through the still heat as she shouts the words that T'Pring never realized she knew. _Kal-if-fee_.

And this was not the way it was supposed to go. This was never Gaila's risk to take, not her duty. But words spoken cannot be revoked, and the challenge has been made.

"No," she says, even so. "I refuse. He will kill you."

Gaila shakes her head, the slightest twist of a smile on her lips.

"He won't, you know," she says. "Because he's not the one I'm going to be fighting."

T'Pring sees triumph in Gaila's eyes then, as if she's managed to steal something precious and get away clean, and she knows that pride is a blade that cuts with both edges. So is logic. T'Pring can win this battle or lose it, and they both know it. Her choice.

For Gaila's sake, she intends to win.

* * *

><p>8 (11) - Justice<p>

Gaila has heard more than once, from traders and politicians and all others who deal with the Vulcan noblewoman on a daily basis, that T'Pring is _cold_. Even the Elder Spock says it, when she says the name in his presence one day, and he means it, and there is warning in his voice when he tells her.

And it's not that they're even really wrong. T'Pring _is_ cold. She serves herself. She could weigh your life and place her own above it, and regret nothing but the inevitability of it. All of that is true.

None of it changes anything. Not because it is irrelevant, but because it is incomplete.

Gaila gets the whole story from Jim, who has seen it all play out in another's memories, in a timeline that will never now come to fruition. She gets the story, and wonders how it is that he of all people could have missed so much. Because hearing it, she feels the oldest truth again, like the edge of a scar, like the hilt of a knife in her hand: there's no one can help you. If you don't help yourself.

And there is more to justice than mercy.

* * *

><p>14 - Temperance<p>

Gaila wakes to sunlight and silence.

She remembers the smell of smoke and burnt plastic, being pulled from a broken ship by strong and steady hands, looking up to see a strange woman's face blurring through a fog of pain. Fragmentary. And then just darkness, and sleep without dreams.

She recovers in tentative peace, surrounded by white hospital sheets, burnt incense and solicitous, eminently logical doctors, and doesn't ever let herself think too much about things that might have happened and didn't.

It is not until many years later that she learns who it was that pulled her to safety.

* * *

><p>16 - The Tower<p>

She leans out over the balcony, thinking of height and weight and acceleration, calculating the force of impact. Enough to wound. Not enough, she thinks, to kill. Her fingers tighten on the railing. These are her lands now by right, wealth and honor, prestige. She has never wanted anything less in her life.

She hears footsteps on the balcony behind her, and stands very still, unflinching. Emotions flicker across the surface of her mind, and she classifies them, locks them down where nothing can affect her. There is anger, distant, that Gaila could not see fit to leave her alone. And there is fear – that she might turn and see contempt in Gaila's eyes, for one who could not abide by one night of what the other has endured for years. Other things, also, that she cannot yet acknowledge and cannot forget.

She does not turn.

Gaila's hands are cool on her shoulders, drawing her back from the edge, and she steps away from the touch, fighting the impulse to cause pain. Weak, she thinks. She has always been so weak.

"That is not the way."

"Not the way _where_, T'Sai Gaila?"

"Not the way _out_."

* * *

><p>21 - The World<p>

It has been a long time since Gaila set foot planetside, and she will be gone again in time, among uncharted stars. But like the rains on Vulcan-that-was, like satellites in their orbits, she always returns. And T'Pring is always there, arms held out to welcome her.

Gaila is older now, as Orions feel time, her red hair gray-streaked, her face lined. She is beautiful.

"Did you miss me?"

"Always," T'Pring says, and means it.

Much has changed, in the years since Vulcan's loss, and some of the change driven by her own hand. She has assumed the mantle of leadership that T'Pau's death had left unclaimed, and she intends to do well by it. The power she once desired, she now holds, loosely, with open hands. It is a worthy life. It is also, at times, a lonely one.

At times. Not always.

"Welcome home, _T'hy'la_."


End file.
